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HP Says It Made the World's Thinnest Laptop (time.com) 166

Posted by BeauHD from the as-thin-as-a-AAA-battery dept.
An anonymous reader writes: HP claims that its Spectre laptop, unveiled April 5, is the world's thinnest laptop. It measures 10.4mm thick or 0.41 inches. That would mean that it's slimmer than the 12-inch MacBook (0.52), MacBook Air (0.68 inches) and Dell XPS 13 (0.59 inches) at their thickest points. It's also thinner than the 0.52-inch Razer Blade Stealth. The new notebook is equipped with an advertised nine-hour battery life, 13-inch HD 1920 x 1080 resolution display, and sixth generation Intel Core i5 or i7 processor. The Spectre will be available for pre-order on April 25 for $1,169.99 before it hits Best Buy stores on May 22 for $1,249.99.
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HP Says It Made the World's Thinnest Laptop More

HP Says It Made the World's Thinnest Laptop

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  • not a good idea (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @05:00PM (#51849007)

    Thin laptops are vulnerable to being bent and cracked in half. They're not very durable. They also tend to have shorter lifespans because there's little room for adequate air circulation and the overheating shortens the life of the components. This probably isn't a good way to spend your money.

    • Re:not a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mr D from 63 ( 3395377 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @05:09PM (#51849049)
      Laptops have already reached the 'thin enough for me' plateau. Weight reduction is still a good thing though.

      • Shaving (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @05:14PM (#51849085)
        I won't be happy until I can shave with mine. And we're talking ZZTop here, not Justin Bieber.

      • Laptops have already reached the 'thin enough for me' plateau. Weight reduction is still a good thing though.

        I think - for me at least - laptops have reached "light enough" as well as "thin enough".

        The first few years of this millennium, I was lugging around a Dell Inspiron 7100 (model # might be wrong) that, with it's power brick and all, weighed around 7 pounds - and that was a fairly light laptop for the time. Then, in late 2004, I bought a 15" Powerbook G4 - it weighed a tad over 5.5 pounds. A 13" MacBook Pro followed sometime around 2009-2010, weighing 4.5 pounds.

        Just recently, I bought a new Retina MacBook P

      • Re:not a good idea (Score:5, Interesting)

        by vux984 ( 928602 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @06:25PM (#51849357)

        They've reached thin enough i think. They could still lose some weight. They could definitely stand to gain some battery life still, especially for more perforamnce oriented units.

        And they could still stand to shed a lot of heat. My macbook pro runs pretty cool most of the time web/email/excel/etc, but some crappy web-sites/web-apps manage to be written poorly enough to burn enough cpu cycles to start warming it up if I leave it on the page; and if i launch a game or even stream one a desktop via steam play it heats up fast... even something pretty nomimal for performance like simple sprite turn based games like ToME, or SotS:The Pit, or the graphical version of "DoomRL" get it too hot to have on my lap... I don't expect to a new tripleA game with the latest shiny 3D graphics and have it run cool... but its pretty irritating that DoomRL heats it up.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Britz ( 170620 )

          > some crappy web-sites/web-apps manage to be written poorly enough to burn enough cpu cycles to start warming it up if I leave it on the page

          NoScript. I run it on Linux for that reason as well. It is a little cumbersome at first, because you have to whitelist a lot of sites, but it gets a lot better fast. Also I use dual browsers or dual profiles. So I can switch if NoScript doesn't work at all.

      • I'd prefer a thicker laptop if it meant NO FAN!

        They want to cram a Core i7 into this thing? Hell, no,

        • Just bought the Asus UX305 [asus.com].

          Very thin and very light (less than 2.5lbs), plus passive cooling. I was wary of the CPU, 900MHz with boost to 2.2GHz, but so far it's been great.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tibit ( 1762298 )

            It's kinda funny how everyone in the PC world bitched about Apple's products being overdesigned etc., and now every modern notebook looks more and more like an Apple product. If only the stupid PC manufacturers would stop putting the damn intake vents on the bottom of the damn things, we'd be golden. Good luck using something with bottom intakes on your lap if you're wearing anything that'll block them. Most women have that problem.

            • I don't think it's about them being overdesigned, but being overpriced. A Macbook with the same specs as that Asus is probably going to cost twice as much.

              Plus it's a Mac... eww.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rinikusu ( 28164 )

        Hell, my favorite laptop body is a thinkpad x200ish (no trackpad.. god I hate trackpads). I'd love to see someone bring this back. Great keyboard, great form factor, utilitarian, easy to access bits.. Give me an x200 with modern components (i7, dual lipstick sata drives in the drive bay, 16-32gb ram, minimum 1080p screen) and fill the rest with battery and I'd be a happy happy boy.

    • I hear people say that, but I'm not so sure it's true. I've got an 11" MacBook Air, and in spite of the usual light abuse my laptops endure, it shows no signs of warping or deforming and none of the electronics have failed. I've actually had chunkier, more solid laptops fare worse.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by plasm4 ( 533422 )
      +4 Insightful? Really?

      Thin laptops are vulnerable to being bent and cracked in half.

      Really?

      They're not very durable.

      Where do you get that idea?

      They also tend to have shorter lifespans because there's little room for adequate air circulation and the overheating shortens the life of the components.

      Come on some kind of citation is appropriate if you're going to make that many assumptions.

      This probably isn't a good way to spend your money.

      Thank you for your wisdom Mr Anon.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tibit ( 1762298 )

      Moreover, who the heck cares how thin a laptop is? Past a certain point, any "improvement" in that respect is pointless.

  • and woe betide you... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @05:07PM (#51849033)

    ...if you sit on it. Or drop it. Or sneeze on it. Or look at it the wrong way.

    This anorexic idiocy has got to stop. 0.75-1" is fine, especially if built properly, and allows for maintenance hatches and cooling systems that can handle 35-45W TDP processors. These things are idiot status symbols.

    • Mark my words HP will never top their EliteBook series; it was relatively thick, durable and easy to take apart to repair. At the time all of us in the office had one and my colleague even had his backpack fall apart and it dropped onto the parking lot asphalt and it survived and was still fully functional albeit some scratches.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Nethead ( 1563 )

        Are you talking about the 8470s? Yeah those things are great. We just refreshed with Dells and now I have a few at home with i5, 480GB SSD and 16 RAM. Old aerospace engineering laptops. We had those traveling all over the world. Very few problems. The 840 is a nice one too, snagged one for my wife, she loves it.

      • Yeah, my work laptop is a Dell Precision that they cherried out with 2 SSDs and 20GB of RAM for me, and it's built like a tank. I've had it for over two years and it survived a similar drop in the parking lot with only the most minor of cosmetic damage. The shell is metal, and pretty thick metal at that, and it's got the nicest display of any laptop I've used (1920x1080). Plus, we still use Windows 7. When they eventually do a laptop refresh for us, I'm hoping I can buy it.

        My personal laptop is a larger

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gfxguy ( 98788 )
          I have a Dell Precision M from several years ago - it's got quite good graphics (required to run an external monitor at 2650 by 1920); it's a good solid machine, but it's ridiculously heavy when I have to travel. Work recently got me a new Dell XPS for road trips... the only reason I'm responding is that these new XPS laptops have insanely great displays... I did manage to get the highest end 15.6 inch version; it has 3840x2160 display. Yes - that's ridiculous on a 15 inch display, right? But graphics ca

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tibit ( 1762298 )

        Well, I have two much thinner 2010 Macbook Pros with some corner dings with asphalt embedded in their unibody to show that the same applies to more modern, thinner hardware, too. I had a few EliteBooks around the office, I'd take even an '09 MBP over that.

  • I can remember when there was a bunch of complaints about the Chicklet keyboards on the Texas Instruments 99/4 computer, so they put a real keyboard on it, and called it the 99/4A.
    Now every laptop has keys that are worse and no one complains. HP made better keys on a folding keyboard I had for my Compaq iPaq. I could put that in a pocket.

    • Chicklet today != chicklet then. The TI chicklet was just a rubber-membrane calculator keyboard. Just awful. The hard chicklet keys on a modern laptop are not everyone's bag, but they are at least usable.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        There continues to be a wide range of keyboards, and some are serviceable, but after using my X1 carbon for months and getting thoroughly used to it, was typing on a W510 and feeling how much better it was.

        However I am outright repulsed by this keyboard on an Acer I have used occasionally. Absolutely flat, trivial key travel, super slick texture.

      • Yeah, the only problem I have is when I sit down at a laptop with a smaller keyboard and find myself weirdly unable to type. I never learned "real" touch-typing, but I can do it... as long as I'm not thinking about it too hard... it's a muscle memory thing. I have an old IBM M clone keyboard at home, which I love, but I haven't used it much in years, and with modern laptop keyboards, I really don't miss it. Whatever they've done with these chiclet-ish keys, they're really nice to use. The only problem I

  • RAM (Score:5, Insightful)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @05:09PM (#51849051) Homepage

    The thing still tops out at 8GiB RAM? I still don't understand why mobile devices have such low amounts of maximum RAM. I purchased a cheap ass 10" netbook some 3-4 years ago for only $300 and was able to effortlessly upgrade it to 8GiB of RAM. Surely a 13" system with more horizontal space could pack more RAM, especially with the increase in memory density?

    • HP is Garbage (Score:5, Interesting)

      by CrashNBrn ( 1143981 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @05:16PM (#51849089)
      HP locks down a large number of their "laptops" with a custom shit-bios. I believe most of their laptops have 2 ram slots. And when you put 2x8GB slots in there - the Bios says 16GB, and when your system finally boots, your OS is allowed to see and use 8GB.

      • Re:HP is Garbage (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Psychopath ( 18031 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @05:23PM (#51849123) Homepage

        Ultraportables generally don't have RAM slots at all. The memory is soldered onto the motherboard, as is the SSD. Sacrificing the ability to upgrade in favor of portability is par for course with this type of system, and the target user usually has a 3-year or less refresh cycle so they don't care.

        • One problem is two memory slots are needed to get the full graphical performance (dual channel ram)

          With a single channel DDR4 design, one good compromise would be 4GB integrated on the motherboard, and one empty slot.
          4GB is well enough for grandma use, spreadsheet etc. and running Windows Update ; an additional 4GB, 8GB or 16GB can be installed by the user or the OEM.
          Better yet put a tiny jumper or a BIOS option to disable the on-board RAM. The PC needs to keep going even if the on-board RAM has bad cells.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Holi ( 250190 )
          No the SSD is not usually soldered, In fact it is replaceable on the Macbook Air, the XPS 13, the Razer Stealth, the previous Spectre 13. In fact I cannot name a single laptop that has a soldered in ssd.
    • In the current OS environment, most people won't get much benefit from more than 8gb of ram, unless they are running a lot of virtual machines, or huge databases. I suspect if you made a venn diagram of people who run huge databases & lots of virtual machines, and people who want the worlds thinnest laptop, that those would be different market segments.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by darkain ( 749283 )

        Or they just run Chrome, and don't want RAM to constantly be swapped in and out.

      • This is flat wrong. Any modern OS will use non-allocated memory for things like disk cache. An SSD is fast but getting the information straight from memory is still about 10x faster on a laptop. 8GB is sufficient for the general usage of a computer. 16GB+ is very helpful for performance if you are measuring uptime in units greater than hours.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Also, when you have an SSD capable of 500Mb/sec or more... It's around the same speed as 66MHz SD RAM. Of course there is more overhead but swapping only causes a barely noticeable pause most of the time.

        • Could you even pair up those two technologies? 66 MHz SDRAM was something you paired up with Pentium 1 processors...I can't see any way you could hook up any SSD to an IDE interface, and they didn't have USB 1.0 even back then.

    • Because vendors have convinced customers that they need pretty computers and not useful computers. It doesn't matter if the specs are good, the keyboard is usable, the touchpad doesn't prevent you from typing, etc. It just needs to be pretty enough to impress other people.

      I've twice tried to replace my X220 with thin, pretty laptops. Once with a Chromebook Pixel and once with a new XPS 13. Both machines lasted a few days before I breathed a sigh of relief and booted the X220 back up. The only thing new

      • Vendors are selling pretty computers because computers have been "good enough" for a while. Performance isn't a big deal for people outside gaming.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I have an NEC LaVie ultrabook with only 4GB of RAM, and performance is fine. Might not want to go too nuts with VMs, but for coding, browsing, a bit of gaming (it's only got Intel graphics) and the like 4GB is fine. Having an SSD really, really helps.

      The RAM is soldered to the mobo, but the SSD and wifi/bluetooth can be replaced and I've upgraded both. When I got it a few years back no-one else did anything that came close in terms of weight and screen size (15"). Asus had some okay models, and Apple did on

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gfxguy ( 98788 )

        My thoughts are similar... I think there is a lot of memory hype going on, and while I've seen a post in this thread talking about 4GB being enough for "grandma" to do web surfing and spreadsheets, 4GB is quite a lot... in one extreme example I saw almost the exact same comment applied to 8GB, where a "serious" user would need 16GB. 4GB will do just about anything most people will be doing, even editing large photos. You WILL see performance improvements with more memory for such applications, but most th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      The thing still tops out at 8GiB RAM? I still don't understand why mobile devices have such low amounts of maximum RAM. I purchased a cheap ass 10" netbook some 3-4 years ago for only $300 and was able to effortlessly upgrade it to 8GiB of RAM. Surely a 13" system with more horizontal space could pack more RAM, especially with the increase in memory density?

      I think the limit is defined by the CPU in use since the modern Core series have the memory controller onboard. Here I think i5s are limited to 8GB of R

  • To quote Men in Black (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "I feel like I'm going to break this damn thing!" [youtube.com]

  • But does it run Linux? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Because if it doesn't... talk to the hand, or buy a macbook.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Only if covered with hot grits, and turned on by Natalie Portman.

    • Has anyone gotten Linux working on the 12" MacBook? Last I heard, neither the keyboard nor trackpad would work at all.

      Of course, it's hard to be sure, since any search invariably also includes the other "Macbook" lines (Pro and Air), making it more difficult to zero in on relevant hits.

    • After the mess failed-CEO Apotheker made with webOS, I wouldn't trust any Linux solution on HP.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Holi ( 250190 )
        At HP I don't think you have to add the "failed" descriptor to CEO, it's already assumed.

  • That is not a hinge design of a laptop that I would want to pick up the laptop by the display. The hinge should be both equally strong using the display to pickup the laptop, or the laptop strong enough to pickup the display.

    Those flashy hinges look like they were designed by someone in marketing, not someone who actually has to use a laptop.

    If you have your choice between this shiny piece of marketing-designed drivel, or an XPS 13 which is known-bulletproof and in at least it's second desig

    • I agree the hinges look like they could be weak but you can't know for sure until you handle it, there could be a 1/4 inch thick steel rod in the hinge with plate reinforcements on both sides for all we know.

      I can't really believe this but HP is literally the first PC vendor to get this right with USB C charging. It's been very disappointing that more vendors aren't using the USB C port for charging and instead are still including proprietary AC charging bricks. Just like Micro-USB did away with the custom

      • Use the wrong USB cable or power brick, and the laptop is likely to lose battery charge while you're using it.
        So you will still need to carry your power brick with your laptop, but I agree it's an improvement. Especially over the hateful use of custom connectors by HP and Dell.

        • USB-C cables shouldn't be an issue once they are in full deployment, the knockoffs are the result of early deployment and ripoff Chinese manufacturers. With a wide deployment I suspect we'll end up with a relatively small number of wattages say around 3-4 different wattages the OEM's can choose from based on the power consumption, and prices should drop significantly as well just like cellphone USB chargers once it was standardized and bulk production dropped the cost. As they deploy out in the real world t

          • Sometimes the laptop has a round plug that is the same as on other laptops, or on stuff like the Bose Sound Link mono speaker. Like most DC inputs on random electronics (but those exist in multiple diameters). Some audio amplifiers can be powered by a laptop power supply. Voltage is almost always 19V. Seems true of the "motherboard brands" and a few other Asian ones, it varies.

            There are a few desktop motherboards with 19V DC input, easier to find is ASRock AM1H-ITX
            I'd try if possible to get a laptop with s

    • +1 for being one of about 13 people in the world who know the word is "drivel" and not "dribble".

  • 8GB RAM max? (Score:3)

    by darthsilun ( 3993753 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @05:25PM (#51849131)
    Srsly? A year ago I was ready to replace my Gen1 MBAir, the then current 13" MBAir also had 8GB max, but for just 200g more, I bought the MBpro and put 16GB in it.

    Okay, so my MBpro is a couple mm thicker. The diff between 10mm, 13mm, and 16mm doesn't bother me; mainly it's the weight I care about. And being able to put 16GB of RAM in it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's almost like different people have different requirements for laptops...

    • And since the better model only cost $200,000 more, it's cheaper than most MacBook models.

  • I beg to differ: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hartree ( 191324 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @05:38PM (#51849193)

    "HP Says It Made the World's Thinnest Laptop"

    A construction company I know has a Cat CS44 vibratory soil compactor that says otherwise.

    Oh. You mean a useful laptop. :)

  • The world's marketing people are going to try selling negative numbers for width pretty soon.
  • Because, you know, in the list of things HP users wish the company would do differently: stop with the bloatware garbage, etc. "Thinnest laptop" is really right there at the top. You know, here on the bleeding edge of 2010. Yawn.

  • Missing CD-ROM (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This isn't useful for my business, there is no CD-ROM drive or PCMCIA slot.
    Thunderbolt to VGA dongles are readily available, so I'm glad other 1990's technology is still alive in the PC.

    --
    Where is B: in Windows 10 ?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      B: is the second floppy drive. Is there a Windows 10 machine out there with 2 floppy drives?

    • I often end up mapping A: and B: to network drives because... why not, these days?

  • But it is still has HP engineering .... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    But it is still has HP engineering, which has burned me on laptops and PCs enough already.

    I won't bore everyone with all the failures over the years.

    Won't touch anything from HP, except PA-RISC stuff.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 )

      All of them have went down the shitter lately. I used to LOVE lenovos... my newest lenovo is the biggest steaming pile of shit I have ever owned. the keyboard misses keystrokes, it's slow as fuck, and the plastic hinges are starting to crack already.

      Lenovo has turned into a steaming pile as well.

  • ...will it blend?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      Probably, if you can actually fit it in the blender. If it's thin enough, you might be able to fold it before blending.

  • Spectre? (Score:4, Funny)

    by colinrichardday ( 768814 ) <colin.day.6@hotmail.com> on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @05:58PM (#51849273)

    This thing had better work, 'cause Spectre doesn't tolerate failure. If a screen breaks, who gets thrown to the sharks?

  • If it runs Windows 10, I don't want it... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @06:27PM (#51849365)
    It doesn't matter how thin it is, if the HP laptop runs Windows 10 I don't want it.

    .
    At this point I am more concerned about the amount of data harvesting being done by Windows 10 than I am about the thinness of a laptop.

  • Should be "It measures 10.4mm thin."

  • Meaning all that extra whatever-ware that HP includes with its offerings.

    Pass.

  • As a Dell tech, sometimes I want to pull my hair out working on some of our laptops and especially convertible laptop/tablets. I can only imagine the nightmare that this one would be. And being so flimsy, a *lot* of them will get broken.

  • HP has the world's slimmest chance of selling me a laptop, or any other computer. Last time I got one it failed due to a known issue and it took me 24 hours+ on the phone with various support departments, and having a customer advocate assigned to me and spend enough time talking to learn things about one another's personal lives, before I got my laptop replaced.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by neminem ( 561346 )

      Last time I got one, the fan failed under warranty, I called them, and they insisted that I never bought a laptop from them - that, in fact, the laptop with the serial number I gave them didn't even *exist*. That took several hours to resolve, before they finally admitted that yep, they were completely wrong about that. Yeah, never buying another HP laptop ever again.

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